The domain

It is on our estate that the AOC Côtes du Rhône began in the Ouvèze valley in Ardèche. We bought this wine estate in 2007 and rented it by volume of grapes to a winemaker. Passionate about taste and cooking, I started cooking Balsamic and wine without any addition, all by hand with the old machines found in the sheds. In 2018, starred chefs offered to buy my products and that I become their brand Mère Brazier and Mr Marchesseau. So I resigned from national education to train in viticulture then to settle in DJA. We introduced our wines during the "farm to farm" event and many people are now asking for our wine so we bottled it and participated in an international organic wine competition. The nice score convinced us to market our wine. The wine is made on our Chambransac farm (building 500m from our Blacher farm where the balsamic is made) so that there is no mixing of material or air with the vinegar.

The vines

All our crops are organic (but when we take new plots, they convert) and we use our sheep for manuring and winter weeding. Some plots cannot be mechanized and we can only access them on horseback or on foot. We use low dose treatments, but early and a lot of passages in the plots, which has protected us well from diseases (even though our area was badly affected this year)
Everything is done by hand to cut and collect, we just pick up the boxes with a trailer. The land is very well exposed because we are just below the Cévennes fault and there are acid flows on limestone terrain and springs all along the fault. The grapes really have an exceptional taste. The vines are on hillsides and sometimes suffer from the heat, but they are full of sunshine.

Winemaking

We prioritize cleanliness (my husband is a nurse ;-) so as not to need to use disinfectant... We sort the bunches by hand to remove the grains which could have been touched by flies or hail or disease. then we destemme and ferment in vats. The punching down is manual and we only use the pumps to move the juice. Our press is also manual. The wine is aged in fiberglass. Bottling is manual. There are no additions to the wine of any kind during the entire manufacturing process.